ThinkSoJoE's Thoughts

Here's something you may not know about me.  When my daughter Madison was a baby, I used to sing two songs to her when I put her down for bedtime.  Those two songs are "Zoe Jane" by Staind, and "Silhouettes"  by Smile Empty Soul.

Flash forward 5 years later.  Madison's sixth birthday is coming up, and for the last four years I've been in a band called thinksobrain.  To this day, we've yet to open for a national act, but that's all going to change on August 1st.  The band?  Smile Empty Soul.  I finally get to say that I'll be sharing the stage with a major label band, and it's a band that has such a special meaning to me.

August is going to be an extremely busy month, so it's only fitting that we're starting the month off with a show.  On August 20th, we're playing the Honoring The Idol 2010 pre-party with Penntera.  A week later, it's a hometown stop at the Evening Star Concert Hall with Where She Wept, and the next night it's our first Club Diablo show in over two years with Dead Before Dawn.  Hope to see everybody out! 

 I last posted here at ThinkSoJoE's Thoughts a couple of days before the first show with the new thinksobrain lineup.  I'll say that show went pretty well.  It felt so good to be back on stage again with Jorge right beside me, and that feeling was only accentuated by Dave and Jinx being up there with us.  To be able to play some of the old stuff again, along with some new material, was absolutely amazing.

We played a show the other night around the corner from the place we played that first show back.  It was extremely hot in the place and the acoustics were terrible.  We didn't play badly, and apparently everywhere else except where I was standing while playing my guitar, things sounded pretty good.

Well, the next step for us is to hit the studio, and we've officially confirmed that we are indeed doing so in the very near future.  We all picked one song each, and will hopefully have, at the very least, a four song demo to shill at our next show, be it the charity show at Chuggers in West Seneca on August 20 or something sooner.  The songs that we've decided on are one of our newest, "Dave's Tune,"  an old favorite, "World Falls Apart," and re-recordings of "Greater Than Expected" and "King of Chaos."  

I'm off for now, check back in a couple of weeks for updates from the studio! 

For two years, we've sat by and watched all these other bands come and go.  In two days, a band that seemed to have fallen into that "came and went" category will return to the stage.  Of course I'm talking about thinksobrain.  It took us nearly two years, but Jorge and I have finally found the right drummer and the right guitarist, and finally, nearly two years to the day of our last show, we're back.  This Friday is about nothing more, in my mind, than thinksobrain.

There's an air of buzz surrounding this show.  There are some fans that are nearly as excited about it as we are.  A lot of planning has gone into this, and it will all unfold on the stage in just two days.

See you then.

For the record, I'm speaking off the record.  I've got nothing really to talk about. 

I could talk music - Dave has proven an excellent addition to the thinksobrain family, but with no drummer to speak of, we're kinda stalled at the moment.

I could talk business.  Business isn't so bad right now - I actually did my first professional logo for the band Dead Before Dawn.  They love it, and personally, I'm extremely happy with the way it turned out.  Maybe I can do work without absolutely hating it after a week.  That's parlayed itself into a partnership of sorts between Fropac Productions and Dead By Dawn drummer Steve Brown's Guilty Truth Entertainment.  I suppose I could talk about that.

Steve and I have discussed business before, since we're both looking to get our entertainment companies off the ground.  The thing is, in recent months Steve has pushed more towards the live entertainment aspect of the business, while I've pushed more towards the promotions aspect of the business.  In that sense it enables us to work together to promote each others businesses as we offer different services.

Guilty Truth is promoting it's first show in a couple of weeks, Friday, March 26 at the American Legion Post on Main Street in Tonawanda, NY.  If everything goes according to plan, yours truly will be the MC for the night and Fropac Productions will have a presence. 

So I happened to check out my friend Eric's blog, which he's been updating less than I've been updating this one, if you can believe that.  I know he's working on a new design, and in his latest entry (which was all the way back on January 3rd), he's got a link to check out the potential new design.  Let's take a look, shall we?

Looks pretty good, Eric.  I especially like the post titles how they start on the side with the date and avatar and then shrink into the post title.  Hey, wait a minute - that's what I did on my blog!  Now, don't get me wrong.  In no way, shape, or form do I think Eric copied my idea.  I don't know if he'd even seen my design before starting work on his.  Eric is a great designer and I have no doubt that it's pure coincidence that his post title concept is similar to mine.  I just thought it was funny and figured I'd have a little bit of fun with the similarities.